This is great news: if you’ve signed up for the Do Not Call register, you no longer have to renew your registration. Once you’re on there, you’re on there for good.
Picture: Getty Images
The registration period has been extended several times, most recently being raised to eight years. But never having to renew at all — a legislative change which passed both houses of Parliament yesterday — is a major improvement. Australians hate telemarketers and don’t want to hear from them.
The existing exemptions for politicians and charities remain, and offshore scammers are also unfortunately not going to pay any attention to the list. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth signing up. If you haven’t, do it now, and know you’ll never have to do it again.
Comments
14 responses to “Woo-Hoo! Do Not Call Registrations Now Run Forever”
Politician’s should not be able to robocall me. That shit is not cool.
It should be an Opt-IN program.
And there should be no excpetions apart from emergency services.
“Hello?”
“Hi. This is the fire brigade. We notice your house is on fire. Would you like us to come around and put that out for you?”
Hmm. It said it would be active for eight years when I just re-registered. 8 < ∞
I imagine updating the tech will take a few days
Can we add goddamn charities to the Do Not Call? Being a c*nt to them gets tiring. Unfortunately I’ve tried being nice, but then they’re persistent.
I don’t be rude, but I hate the imposition of being asked to donate to charity. I already donate to causes I have personally chosen & organisations I have researched and determined to be trustworthy. If I find myself in a better situation financially I might increase my donations or add a charity, I would never sign up to a charity because someone in the street stops me and asks me or because of a 2 minute phone conversation.
Oh I hate chuggers so much. Had three from the same group try to corner me each, one after the other yesterday, after telling the first two I was on the damn phone the third one still had a go.
In the previous suburb I lived in, they used children for the door knocking, for the guilt factor you could see their parents standing on the foot path.
“I’ve depleted my charity giving budget for this financial year.”
“Thankyou for drawing my attention to your worthy cause, hungry jobless backpacker. I will check out the website and make my donation there.”
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We dropped our landline due to the volume of cold calls. This despite having an unlisted number that was on the DNC register.
Almost all were from overseas call centres (probably) randomly dialling numbers. They would happily provide their information knowing that ACMA can’t touch them.
They likely keep and share a log of which numbers are and aren’t live. As we would go through spates of multiple calls per night and then weeks of none.
So far (touch wood) they don’t seem to have moved onto mobiles.
There is a bug in the confirmation link that they email you to complete the registration.
They send you 2 links, the first is the one you just click directly from your email client, and the second is the one you copy & paste into your browser.
I used the copy & paste link and it didn’t work. I tried to register twice and both emails sent me a broken link.
I then looked at the direct click link, and it is different to the copy & paste link. Copy & paste link has an ampersand (&) missing near the end of the link.
I am on the DNC and I have a silent number but was still getting a lot of charity calls. There is apparently a trick to getting charities to take you off their call list.
I had a recent experience with one well known charity that were calling me at least once a week. Each time they rang I asked them to take me off their call list and was assured that I had been and then a week later I would get another call. I eventually rang them myself to make a complaint and spoke to someone helpful who explained to me that asking to be removed from their call list when someone calls you just gets you taken off the list of the person that is currently on the phone with you. That specific person will never ring you again, but someone else from that charity can still call you from their individual call list. You have to ring and specifically ask to get taken off their main database. Since I did that, I have had zero calls from them.
I don’t mind giving to charity when I can afford to, but regular phone calls almost amount to harassment in my opinion.
Turned off the ringer on all our landline phones yesterday. Sick of the “government solar rebate” calls. DNC register is useless for overseas based calls, and there is a ridiculous charge for the “benefit” of a silent number. Autodiallers get around this anyway. Naked DSL is not available for us.
Presumably the phone is ringing away all day and spam callers are wasting their time, not ours.